Justifying the ways of God to menIN THE anteroom of Roy Moore’s office hangs a large photograph of the granite slab that once cost him his job. The picture is one of the room’s three depictions of the Ten Commandments, which also include a pair of wooden tablets carved by Mr Moore himself. Those caused a kerfuffle when he was a circuit-court judge in the 1990s—a warm-up for the row in which a federal court ruled that the monument in the photo violated the constitution, Mr Moore refused to remove it from the rotunda of Alabama’s judicial building, and, in 2003, was ousted as the state’s chief justice. The religious memorabilia are now more discreet, but Mr Moore, reinstated in 2012, is not. He has picked a fight over an issue that has assumed apocalyptic proportions for many devout Americans: gay marriage.
On January 6th he instructed Alabama’s probate judges, responsible for issuing marriage licences, not to grant them to same-sex couples. He argues that a prohibition of the Alabama Supreme Court last year remains in effect—despite the subsequent judgment of the federal Supreme Court, in a case technically...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/1PqU1KV
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